Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Another thinky post. This one will be short. First, a shout-out to conuly who kindly drew attention to my error in the last post about food insecurity, and also gave me an invaluable new vocabulary term: "Food Collecting Peoples" instead of "Hunter Gatherers" does away with the "hunter" label that brings up sexist and inaccurate ideas about how those people lived.

I made a mistake in the first "extra stuff" note I put in the comments to the last thinky post about the invention of agriculture and whether inequality and war are necessarily linked to "civilization."

It's a very common assumption that food collecting peoples live a more precarious and food insecure existence than farmers - that they are more in danger of starving to death. This has generated not just harmless mistakes like my footnote but scads of bad science based on this assumption, such as the harmful "Thrifty Genotype" hypothesis among dieticians which assumes that gaining weight gain happens because humans are adapted to survive alternating waves of feast and famine, and thus self-starvation through dieting is the only proper way to address obesity (the more I learn about diet and obesity science the more I learn just how wrongheaded and discriminatory the entire discipline is).

In fact, food collecting peoples were *not* more prone to suffer food insecurity than farming peoples. Three separate analyses using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (TIL that there is a standardized data set for making cross cultural analyses, which is tailored to eliminate similarities due to cultural borrowing by limiting itself to cultures that are widely separated in space/time) found that this is in fact not the case. Comparing across all cultures in the sample, there's no difference in food insecurity between farmers and food collectors. If you control for climate (because arctic food collectors like the Inuit *are* more food insecure and in danger of starvation), then food collectors are *less* likely to be food insecure than farmers. Farmers are tied to their land and at the mercy of whatever happens to their crops, but food collectors can pick up and move to a different area, or simply switch to a different food source that was not impacted by the drought/flood/whatever (here is the only open access article of the three. It's the most recent and footnotes 19 and 20 link to the other two articles. CW: the article's discussion centres the obesity research angle).

The myth of food collectors' food insecurity is mostly born of prejudice (the assumption that life "in the state of nature" was "nasty brutish and short" dates back at least to the 17th century). Some of it is due to selective noticing of the data: famine and food insecurity was at least sometimes an issue for both food collectors and farmers. And some of it traces back to the artificially created food insecurity of people under colonialism and post-colonialism, which the colonizers always blamed on the victims rather than admitting their role. (having your land arbitrarily chopped into blocks that you're not allowed to go onto is not good for food collectors, even before we add the colonizers actively murdering them). Even today, most google hits for "hunter gatherer food insecurity" are papers and articles about how *former* food collecting cultures are suffering food insecurity now that they have largely ceased their own collecting practices and come to rely on food distribution by the nations in which they live. And, finally, at least in my case, some of the myth is due to wrongfully applying the special case of arctic peoples (the one climate where agriculture is impossible and food collectors do suffer from increased food insecurity) too broadly - I remembered reading about how Nanook (of the 20's documentary Nanook of the North) starved to death a few years after the film was made, which was explained as not unusual among the Inuit, and I took that as confirmation that I could accept the received myth and didn't have to google yet another fact.

So, with that myth debunked, why, exactly, did food collecting people switch to farming over most of the world? Farming is measurably worse by almost every metric: more work for the same or greater food insecurity, with more disease, worse nutrition (from a less varied diet), shorter lifespans, shorter adult stature, etc.

That farming made you more susceptible to disease was not evident to premodern people lacking tools to make statistical analyses, but at least some of the consequences of farmers' ill health *were* visible. An example off the top of my head (from the book 1491 by Charles Mann): early European accounts of First Nations people mentioned how healthy, tall, robust, and handsome Indians were compared to the malnourished, disease ridden Europeans. Most of the Indians in question were farmers themselves, but they had a broader, more nutritionally complete set of crops and, without domesticated animals, they were relatively disease-free. If the bigoted Europeans noticed and commented on the difference between better-nourished, disease free First Nations farmers and themselves, then food collectors must have noticed differences in health between themselves and the farmers whose technology they adopted.

First, in some places, food collectors didn't switch so much as get assimilated by farmers who moved into the area - genetic analysis of human remains from central Europe shows that the switch from food collecting to farming involved a genetic change, with an influx of people showing some degree of Anatolian ancestry moving in with their farming technology and mating with the local food collectors. But in other areas that genetic shift does not occur (the food collectors of the Baltic states, for instance, adopted the agricultural technology but did not interbreed with the people that brought it to them).

Second, depending on how violent that assimilation process was, people like those Baltic food collectors might have adopted farming in self-defence, regardless of the downsides.

Elsewhere, for instance in North America, there's clear evidence of agricultural technology diffusing without attendant migration, so: no assimilation or threat of assimilation. Why switch to a food system that required more work, had visible negative effects on the people who adopted it, and provided no real improvement in food security?

One common answer is that they were forced to by population pressure. (eg, Jared Diamond) This is Malthusian bullshit (another thinky post about Malthus being completely wrong will happen someday). Humans have always had the ability to limit their family sizes. Population only increased when technological change made it possible to reduce the land area per person. Look at the times between those technological shifts, and population remains extremely stable with little to no growth for vast stretches of time. There was no Malthusian pressure on food collectors to increase their food supply. Population increases happened after they changed their technology, not before.

Another answer I've seen mooted is that agriculturalists live settled lives and that enables them to accumulate more belongings and become richer than nomads. This overlooks the vast number of settled food collecting societies, where rich natural food sources meant people could live in one place permanently and own lots of things, without becoming farmers. It also overlooks that nomadic food collectors had a home range with which they were deeply familiar, and a limited number of home camps that they visited at more or less set times, depending on the season and what food sources were due to become collectable where. They could cache belongings at those camps and not have to limit themselves to what they could carry. So they weren't necessarily as poor and bereft of possessions as the popular conception of them would have.

A lot of the links I get when googling for reasons that food collectors switched to farming focus on the *invention* of farming, and provide the suggestion that this was done because settled food collectors in naturally rich areas (like the parts of the fertile crescent where wheat farming was invented) had to either become unsettled or invent new ways to get food when the place they had been living became less rich, whether due to climate change or over-exploitation. Which is not at all in accord with what we know about the actual time lines of plant domestication, extending as they do back to the height of the last glacial period, so that the food collectors were perfecting agriculture while the climate was improving and the richness of their homeland was increasing (see my previous thinky, linked above).

To restate the question: of the food collectors who had the choice to adopt already-invented farming technology (many desert/steppe dwellers and all arctic people did not have that choice, nor did those who adopted it under the threat of assimilation), some did not adopt the new tech, or resisted doing so until colonialism/invasion took away their choice (maybe because they saw evidence of the many downsides of farming). Others accepted the choice, despite those visible downsides: why? I still haven't found a reason proposed that sits well with me. But I do have a crackpot theory of my own.

Maybe, just maybe, it was because while agriculture did not provide any real benefit to settled food collectors, it did give the *appearance* of benefit. It gave the illusion of control: it made the people who did it feel that they were better able to ward off bad times because as a farmer, you were creating your own food, instead of being dependant on the forces of nature to provide food for you. Food collecting meant being at the mercy of countless factors beyond your control or ken. Farming meant being at the mercy of just one: rainfall. It wasn't actually better than food collecting, but it felt better, because *it was less scary*, and that's why it proved so popular.